Schinckel.net

This is a test.

I’ve been uploading my weekly favourite PostSecrets - the cream of the crop, if you like. This weeks were great, again: I hope she succeeded! (Man, her legs are skinny!) And doesn’t everyone do this? (Just kidding, I don’t make her look at it, just describe it to her!) I’m guessing Max won’t be in this situation, Jason?

I only just noticed this one today. Depending on the file format you add as an attachment to Mail.app, it’s possible to resize the image directly from the Compose window: This works with JPEG, PDF, PNG and possibly others. The toolbar will only appear if the image is large enough to bother with a potential resize, however. And the most interesting thing is that a resize changes the format to JPEG from PDF. And, you can set the popup menu to a value, and each new image you drag will be resized as per the popup. Sometimes, you can revert back to the original file format by choosing Actual Size, but at least once this didn’t work for me.

No words. Just let these talk for themselves:

Creating custom Address Book fields wasn’t quite as painless as I’d hoped. At least, not in a form that doesn’t look like being broken in future updates. The simplest method is to choose a field you aren’t already using. I chose Related Names, since I didn’t know until that point that this field existed! The other fields that were available weren’t really appropriate: Maiden Name does not allow for duplicates, and Dates is designed, for, well, dates. The next step is to set up the template. Go to Preferences, and choose the Template tab. Choose Related Names from the Add Field popup menu, and alter the label to whatever you want it to be. Now, you can go and add data of the type you require. Some caveats: the items in the Template will only appear if the record (person) you are editing does not have any items in the ‘Related Names’ field(s). If they do, you can add extras, but the ones you added to the Template do not appear in the list. Might file this as a bug.

ManOpen is a great idea. Why be limited to viewing man pages in the _Terminal _you are working in, when you can offload it to another window, another application even. Even before this came along, I investigated other solutions, like using groff to generate a PDF, and viewing that (too slow), and starting a new Terminal window and viewing the man page in that. Generally, this would involve a Cmd-N, then man _whatever_. Then I found ManOpen. I blogged about how I had some issues with ManOpen under Tiger, but an update fixed this. What the update didn’t fix, in fact, what it screwed up were some Classic Applications. See, in OS X, Apple decided to use extensions rather than meta-data as the main way of telling if a file is an application or porn. Or any other type of file, for that matter. Which is all well and good if the application has a name that actually ends in .app. But what about older OS9 applications, like Photoshop 5.5. I know, I know, upgrade to CS. Well, we run that too, but PS5.5 runs under Classic, and we kind of need to run under Classic to get decent print quality. Or decent PDF quality and small sizes. So, Adobeâ„¢ Photoshopâ„¢ 5.5, which ends with a .5 used to work. Before ManOpen decided to ‘0wn’ all of the files that end in .5, or .n (where n is any single digit, excluding 0). Which meant that trying to run this program caused ManOpen to, well, open. I didn’t twig this until I had tried as hard as I could to get PS5.5 to actually run itself. File Buddy was showing it as a Classic Application, but the Finder just wouldn’t. The bizarre thing is that I only have ManOpen installed under one user’s ~/Applications, so in theory it shouldn’t affect other users. But for some reason, it changed the owner of all files ending in .5, and Script Editor decided it should try to open it. So, if Google sent you here, the solution is: add .app to the file name. It’s as simple as that…

This isn’t really a full review or comparison, just a few quick notes. I downloaded the demo version of iMediaView Pro, and ran it. I let it import all of my iPhoto library, and was fairly disappointed it didn’t automatically albumize them according to my iPhoto albums. I must say I don’t like the interface nearly as much as iPhoto’s. iPhoto is pretty much a great program, except it’s dog slow whenever you try to do anything. But it’s simple to use, and really has all of the cataloguing features I need right now. I just use a Smart Playlist to list every photo that doesn’t have an album, and create a new album each time I import photos, and add them all to that. Now that iPhoto has folders, I can have a level of hierarchical organisation. And iPhoto has built-in capabilities to view photos by date of creation. If only it wasn’t so. damn. slow.

Apparently, it’s possible to use JavaScript to preload images. checked = new Image(); checked.src = "/images/true.gif"; unchecked = new Image(); unchecked.src = "/images/false.gif"; This is better than doing the CSS trick display:none;, as this doesn’t always preload in every browser.

Since upgrading to Tiger, Jaq obviously hadn’t done any creating PDFs in Distiller. It still uses Classic, and Tiger upgrades stop it from actually producing the PDF files. However, there is a solution: open up Distiller, and change the Job Options... settings for all of the profiles, so that _Fast Web Vie_w, and Embed Thumbnails are both unchecked. Bingo, works again.

I received the strangest Spam today. Gmail didn’t flag it as Spam, but that’s because there isn’t much to it:

X-Gmail-Received: 207621b91521d8580702cc6b8f5dc303db882c71
Delivered-To: xxx@gmail.com
Received: by 10.70.73.14 with SMTP id v14cs27376wxa;
        Sun, 16 Oct 2005 21:21:02 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.36.105.16 with SMTP id d16mr2452237nzc;
        Sun, 16 Oct 2005 21:21:02 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <onisimvfdi@aucklandnz.com>
Received: from m1.dnsix.com (m1.dnsix.com [63.251.171.164])
        by mx.gmail.com with ESMTP id e1si1376069nzd.2005.10.16.21.21.02;
        Sun, 16 Oct 2005 21:21:02 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (gmail.com: 63.251.171.164 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of onisimvfdi@aucklandnz.com)
Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 21:21:02 -0700 (PDT)
Message-Id: <435326ae.1e47a7b1.2e3f.ffffea7aSMTPIN_ADDED@mx.gmail.com>
Received: from [221.169.78.40] (helo=aucklandnz.com)
	by m1.dnsix.com with smtp (Exim 4.44)
	id 1ERF09-0008R3-2k
	for xxx@xxx.com; Sun, 16 Oct 2005 13:21:01 -0700

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>404 Not Found</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Not Found</H1>
The requested URL was not found on this server.<P>
<HR>
<ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.31</ADDRESS>
</BODY></HTML>

No web addresses, one email. I think maybe this Spammer had a problem… The two IP addresses listed as the first sources, those Received: headers that appear first, are both Private Range IP addresses, but the m1.dnsix.com one seems like the service provider. Oh well, no biggie.